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In this article I will describe how to setup a rescue system that – assumed PXE boot is supported – bootable via PXE / NFS over the network. Such a rescue system is useful if a node is not accessible after an reboot (for example after a distribution update). I approve grml as rescue system, but the setup should work with other linux rescue systems too (like SystemRescueCd, Knoppix). Anymore we will setup dhcpd, atftp, nfs and syslinux.

A variety of constituencies from the West have taken it upon themselves to reach out to China to "educate" the Chinese about the existing global standards development infrastructure, and to urge them to take part in that infrastructure in the same way as do other countries.

This is strictly a matter of taste, but I think that Linux Mint 10 may be the prettiest Linux I’ve seen. Now, I know that isn’t a great reason to pick a distribution — but out of the box, it helps. Especially for those of us who want to convince Windows XP refugees to switch to Linux instead of Windows 7 or Mac OS X. If you’re going to be staring at a system for a few hours — or all day, you want it to look good. Good is relative, and what looks spiffy to an expert user who spends much time at the command line is probably going to be slightly different than what looks good to novice Linux users. Suffice it to say, they’ve done good.

I just saw the Linux Devices article about the new Google Chrome notebooks, the arrival of which I've been anticipating for about a year. I'd love to get my hands on one of these devices, and through Google's pilot program maybe it'll actually happen.

Most people think “graphical interfaces” when they think of surfing the Web. And, under X11, there are lots of great programs, like Firefox or Chrome. But, the console isn't the wasteland it might seem. Lots of utilities are available for surfing the Web and also for downloading or uploading content.

I wrote yesterday about the "whimsical spaceship" (that's a good name, don't you think?) theme coming to the Debian Squeeze desktop and Grub screen and wondering why the login screen still was so Lennyish. Today a new gdm3 package rolled into Squeeze, and once it installed I logged out and saw yet more spaceship whimsy. This theme does have a "real" name: SpaceFun.

Earlier this year there was the "Humble Indie Bundle" where anyone could purchase a set of four Indie computer games (that are Linux compatible) for any price they wanted. The games included World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, and Penumbra Overture. This ended up being such a success with the game developers that they ended up open-sourcing the games after raising quite a bit of money off this bundled deal. Now it appears the developers are working on a second Humble Indie Bundle.

Recently I have caught myself deep into discussions on the extent of copyright applied to Free Software and how the copyleft effect plays a role in Software Freedom. On an Identi.ca message I said: Free Software is NOT about the freedom to choose the license under which software made by others can be redistributed. Let me expand a bit on copyleft compatibylity.

With the next kernel version, Ext4 will reach new levels of performance and use a trick to increase its storage media formatting speed. Other new features include a discard function that is interesting for slow-trimming SSDs, the "Rados Block Device" for cluster devices, bug fixes and optimisations to Btrfs.

Google Chrome extensions are a good way to get more features and functionality to your browser, this is a nice collection of google chrome extension for this week.

If you though Gedit is great, wait till you try GMate! GMate is a collection of plugins, themes/styles and other improvements to get TextMate-like features in Gedit.

In this article I intend to show that a church, or other charity, can financially benefit from a switch to Linux on the desktop and in the server closet.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on a Fedora 14 GNOME desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I'm using an NVIDIA GeForce 8100 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop. I will use the free nouveau driver in this tutorial instead of the proprietary NVIDIA driver. nouveau is an accelerated Open Source driver for NVIDIA cards that comes with experimental 3D support on Fedora 14 - on my test system 3D support was working without any problems.

TrueCrypt is secure, multi-platform, and free "as in beer". The first article illustrated the power of TrueCrypt (a readily available encryption package that is platform independent) and the second article provided a command line method of setting up an encrypted partition on a USB drive. As a result of having read both these articles, It occurred to me that there may be renewed interest in external device encryption with the rash of lost or stolen USB drives, or external hard drives, in recent years. It only makes sense. If you lose an encrypted drive that contains sensitive data, (see the first article listed above) you are only out the value of the drive. If you lose an unencrypted drive, you have the potential to be out thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Which would you prefer?

"If you are running out of RAM on your Linux system, you will want to find the culprit in order to solve the problem, either by reconfiguring the RAM-hungry application or by stopping it." "We'll use ps, awk, head and sort with a pipe, to find out which application is consuming our RAM" "List running processes ordered by RAM usage" ps aux | awk '{print $2, $4, $11}' | sort -k2rn | head -n 20"

I wondered why my formerly favorite open-source-focused blogger Matt Asay has been so ... silent lately. He became Canonical's COO not so long ago, his Cnet blog went into hibernation, his personal blog not so much (but not exactly bursting with activity, either), and he didn't exactly cut a large profile media-attention-wise at Canonical.

The Gimp is a fantastic and free piece of software that can run on all major operating systems and can do nearly any graphic related task! I have been using GIMP for over two years now and really appreciated the many tutorials I had at hand for when I was starting out. Since the early days I have produced my own tutorials in an effort to give back to the open source community and so the purpose of this post is to share and acknowledge the hard work that people have put in into making these great tutorials of 2010!

KDE 4.6 will be slightly more ambitious than the last couple of releases. Judging from the recently-announced first beta, it will include the usual behind-the-scene enhancements, and additions of interest to developers. But it will also include some concrete improvements to the desktop, especially with the changes to the Dolphin file manager and the so-called re-introduction of Activities.

NetCitadel LLC released version 4.1.3 of Firewall Builder today. Firewall Builder is a leading firewall management solution for Linux iptables and other firewalls.

DockBarX 0.41 has just been released, featuring redesigned window previews and menu as well as a close button for the window previews. Before more info on the latest DockBarX, here are some screenshots: